Contingent Architecture:
Digital Feelings in Real Space
Digital communication has been the norm and the way that we use it has changed how we show and convey our emotions to each other. Emoticons and symbolic abbreviations show up on a screen in a pocket with a beep or show tune blip over audio. We show happiness by two taps to the keyboard :).
Real or virtual, we go about our days, meandering into markets, offices, parks, homes, streets, and flights waiting for a surprise moment when the screen begs for attention; we wait for that moment to show devotion. Sometimes the devotion is an unexpected digital rant that is out of place in a current space that is occupied.
We live our lives in the physical world, but our emotions have to be conveyed remotely. More often than not we react by typing some symbols that cross languages and oceans to another screen in another pocket.
This work visualizes these symbols into momentary meditations of movement in space. A strip of LEDs is moved through space, abstracting our digital avatars of emotion and devotion to each other into dances of light.
